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OUT OF THE NORTHWOODS
The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan

by Michael Edmonds

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

 Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855
© 2009 by State Historical Society of Wisconsin

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Printed in Canada
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13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edmonds, Michael.
Out of the north woods: the many lives of Paul Bunyan / by Michael Edmonds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87020-437-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bunyan, Paul (Legendary
character)—Legends. I. Title.
GR105.37.P38E35 2009
398.20973'2—dc22
[E]
2009005646

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
 CONTENTS

List of Tables
Cast of Characters
Preface
Map
1. Who Was Paul Bunyan?
2. Bunyan’s Origins in Fact and Fiction
3. Lumberjacks and Their Culture
4. How the Tales Were Told
5. The Earliest Surviving Versions
6. The Curious Claims of Gene Shepard
7. Out of the Woods and onto the Page
8. Stewart and Watt, the First Careful Collectors
9. Charles Brown Gets Caught in the Middle
10. Bunyan Becomes a Celebrity
11. Competing Claims to Fame
Appendix: Bunyan Tales Told in Wisconsin, 1885—1915
Bibliography
Notes
Index
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1
Publication of the Bunyan Tales in Periodicals, 1904–1917

Table 2
The First Bunyan Motifs to Be Printed, 1904–1914

Table 3
How Printing Changed the Bunyan Tales

Table 4
Publication of the Bunyan Tales in Major Periodicals, 1918–1927

Table 5
Publication of the Bunyan Tales in Books and Pamphlets, 1914–1927
 CAST OF CHARACTERS

Bartlett, William W. (1861–1933): historian of the Chippewa

Valley who interviewed loggers, ca. 1913–1927, to gather Bunyan
stories

Brown, Charles E. (1872–1946): director of Wisconsin Historical

Museum who collected Bunyan stories, 1906–1946, and published
fifteen booklets of them, 1922–1945

Charters, W. W. (1875–1952): Ohio State University professor who

collected Bunyan materials as a hobby and corresponded with
Bunyan editors during the 1940s

Dorson, Richard (1916–1981): Indiana University professor of

folklore and the most vocal critic of the midcentury Bunyan mania

Laughead, William (1882–1958): advertising manager of the Red

River Lumber Company, which issued more than 125,000 copies of
his Bunyan stories, 1914–1944, and launched Bunyan’s fame;
invented the names of Bunyan’s crew, including Babe the Blue Ox

Lovejoy, Parrish S. (1884–1942): forester with the Michigan

Department of Conservation who wrote a series of Bunyan tales
under the pseudonym Charles Albright for the American Lumberman,
1916–1918

MacGillivray, James (1873–1952): Michigan lumberman who

heard the Round River tales in the Saginaw Valley in 1887 and
drafted a text of them for his brother William’s Oscoda, Michigan,
newspaper in 1906
Rockwell, James E. (1883–1953): Duluth, Minnesota, reporter
who published the first collection of Bunyan stories to reach a
national audience, in the Milwaukee nature magazine Outer’s Book,
in February 1910

Shepard, Eugene (1854–1923): Rhinelander, Wisconsin, timber

cruiser and northwoods promoter who claimed to have invented Paul
Bunyan

Shephard, Esther (1891–1975): San Jose State College professor

who collected Bunyan tales in the Pacific Northwest for a 1924 book,
one of two that made Bunyan famous (no relation to Eugene
Shepard)

Stevens, James (1892–1971): West Coast logger and public

relations counsel for the lumber industry who in 1925 wrote the
other book that made Bunyan famous

Stewart, Bernice (1894–1975): northern Wisconsin native who, as

a University of Wisconsin undergraduate collected tales in the field
between 1914 and 1916 with her English professor, Homer Watt

Watt, Homer A. (1884–1948): New York University professor who,

while at the University of Wisconsin in 1914–1916, gathered and
published with Bernice Stewart the earliest collection of Bunyan tales
that was systematically gathered in the field
 PREFACE

WHEN I RECENTLY ASKED MY ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD if she’d ever heard of Paul

Bunyan, she answered, “Sure. He’s that great big guy with the blue
cow.” She was less certain about why he was famous and couldn’t
remember exactly how she’d heard of him. Folklore’s funny that way.
Everybody knows it, but most of us aren’t sure how we first heard it,
and nobody seems to know where it comes from.
Although I’d encountered Paul Bunyan as a child in the 1950s, my
professional curiosity about him was aroused only in 2005 when I
stumbled across a 1916 newspaper photograph of a young woman
under the headline, “Extracts from Paul Bunyan Yarns.” She was
Bernice Stewart, who, as a college student during World War I,
traveled through logging camps to collect Bunyan stories from
lumberjacks. As if that weren’t strange enough, when I looked into
her work further I learned that, although everyone recognized his
name, no one actually knew where Paul Bunyan came from.
Here was a puzzle worth investigating, one that even had an
analogue in a Bunyan tale from Wisconsin: “As a trailer of game
[Bunyan] was unsurpassed. Once he came on a moose in the woods
that had died of old age. Having some spare time, Paul in a short
time traced this moose back to the place where it was born.”
I, too, had some spare time, so I set out on his trail. I soon
discovered that previous researchers had overlooked many early
Bunyan publications and manuscripts from Wisconsin. These
documents suggested that some widely repeated “facts” about the
tales—such as that they started in Maine in the mid-nineteenth
century, that a real-life Paul Bunyan had fought in an 1837 Canadian
rebellion, and that the stories were first printed in Michigan in 1906
—were mistaken.
 From that point on, the game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes
would say. I spent much of 2007 and 2008 pursuing it, and at almost
every turn a new mystery or paradox greeted me. If the stories were
created by macho lumberjacks in all-male settings, why weren’t
there any dirty jokes about Bunyan? Where did Charles Brown, the
most prolific Wisconsin publisher of the tales, acquire his stories?
Why did the W.P.A. Wisconsin Folklore Project records on Bunyan
disappear? How did the private jokes of working-class loggers—the
Hell’s Angels of their day—turn into the cutesy caricature that every
eleven-year-old recognizes a century later?
As I ferreted out answers to questions such as these, I was
astonished at the hold that Bunyan took on me. I’ve always been
fascinated by the ways that knowledge travels across time and
space, but I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed digging up
Bunyan’s roots. The early stories themselves, with ironic touches
reminiscent of Mark Twain and logical contradictions worthy of Lewis
Carroll, had much to do with it. They are, quite simply, fun. And the
people who produced, promoted, and perverted the tales were
fascinating characters. More than one of them had lied, stolen, or
cheated to make tales told by wilderness lumberjacks into a
commodity that could be sold for profit. All told, Bunyan’s strange
career was a fascinating episode in American intellectual history.
I could uncover the true facts about it only because a network of
meticulous collectors had preserved a great deal of primary evidence
long ago. That evidence lies in their unpublished correspondence,
interview notes, and other archival documents scattered across the
northern tier of states. My hunt for records carried me from the sun-
splashed hills of western Massachusetts during a glorious Indian
summer to the icy, gray slush of Minneapolis on a hostile March
weekend.
At crucial moments in my research, James Milostan (of the John
Michael Kohler Art Center), Professor James P. Leary (University of
Wisconsin), and Jim Hansen (Wisconsin Historical Society) each
suggested strategies that cleared away obstacles and led to new
evidence. Barbara Friend, granddaughter of Professor Homer Watt,
generously searched through family papers and opened her home to
me. Kurt Kortenhof (St. Paul College, St. Paul, Minnesota) answered
many questions and shared his research files on Eugene Shepard.
Timm Severud (in the aptly named town of Winter, Wisconsin)
provided knowledge and documents about Chippewa Valley history
and American Indian loggers. Marie Harvat, Meredith Gillies, and
their staff at the Children’s Literature Research Collection, Andersen
Library, University of Minnesota, responded to many inquiries;
promptly provided copies of letters, clippings, and other primary
sources; and made me feel at home in their collections. Galen Poor
and my daughter Rose Edmonds painstakingly examined hundreds
of pages of distant manuscripts for me. My son Devin confirmed my
instincts by laughing at all the right places in an early draft. Jim
Leary generously read and critiqued the manuscript of the entire
book.
My wife, Mary Fiorenza, questioned my methods, my arguments,
and my prose but never my intentions. Instead, she smiled benignly
as I wandered down yet another eccentric path in the bibliographical
woods. As usual, she has been my best critic. Finally, I must thank
our daughter, Julia, for patiently enduring hour after hour in the
University of Minnesota archives while Dad tracked down the origins
of that great big guy with the blue cow.
LOCATIONS IMPORTANT TO PAUL BUNYAN TALES
 CHAPTER ONE
Who Was Paul Bunyan?

“All lumberjacks, of course, believe,

or pretend to believe, that he really lived…“*

MILLIONS OF AMERICANS immediately recognize Paul Bunyan’s name or

face. Over the past century more than 300 books have been written
about him—never mind the 200 recordings, videos, and musical
scores or the half-million Web pages. His name appears on countless
restaurants, resorts, and tourist attractions from Maine to Oregon
and has advertised everything from construction materials to loaves
of bread.
Bunyan is one of the most widespread icons in our culture, a
ubiquitous symbol of American power and ingenuity. His rise to fame
was meteoric, and his fate, like that of most celebrities, was to be
exploited by commercial forces. Where the Bunyan phenomenon
started, however, has always been unclear. His progress from private
joke to public hero is a case study in how knowledge was created,
shared, and commodified in America during the twentieth century.
Long before a single tree had been felled in the Great Lakes
forests, New Englanders told tall tales around colonial hearths about
cold so intense that words froze in the air or snow so deep it
reached the treetops. During the first half of the nineteenth century,
many of these stories moved west with the farmers, storekeepers,
mechanics, and laborers who wandered away from the narrow
Atlantic seaboard into the heart of the continent. Paul Bunyan was
not mentioned in any of them.
 During the 1840s, Maine loggers brought equipment and skills into
the virgin forests of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota in order to
harvest their seemingly limitless stands of white pine. They brought
with them songs and stories about logging back home in New
England; these included “The Jam on Gerry’s Rocks” and “The
Logger’s Boast.” They had never heard of Paul Bunyan.
Over the next thirty years, Great Lakes lumberjacks combined
these traditional folk tales and logging stories with accounts of new
challenges they faced in the western wilderness. In the early 1880s,
the lumber industry mushroomed and thousands of novice loggers
entered the woods. Grizzled veterans in logging shanties from
Saginaw, Michigan, to Duluth, Minnesota, began to tell tall tales
about the old days, when things were really tough. Some of them
claimed to have worked for a camp foreman named Paul Bunyan,
whose unusual size, strength, and cleverness helped his men escape
catastrophes or solve problems. Wisconsin timber cruiser Bill
Mulhollen told the first reliably documented tales about Paul Bunyan
during the winter of 1885–1886 in the upper Wisconsin River valley,
at a logging camp a few miles north of Tomahawk, Wisconsin.
It’s possible that Mulhollen heard them from fellow timber cruiser
Gene Shepard, who claimed many times to have invented Bunyan.
Shepard was famous throughout the lumber industry for captivating
listeners with tall tales, and he spent the winter of 1882–1883 with a
logging crew in the same area where Mulhollen told the first known
Bunyan stories three winters later.
Unfortunately, Shepard was also a shameless liar who fabricated
hoaxes, couldn’t resist a practical joke, and plagiarized other
people’s work. Every statement he made in public has to be
assumed false until proved otherwise, including his claim to have
invented Paul Bunyan. We will probably never know for certain
whether he was the first person to spin tales about the mythical
lumberjack hero, but he was certainly nearby when they were first
told aloud in 1885–1886 and again when they were first printed, in
1904 in Duluth, Minnesota.
 Between 1880 and 1910, Bunyan stories were told aloud in
logging camps from Michigan to the Pacific. New tales about Bunyan
sprung up among pipeline workers in the oil fields of Texas and
among doughboys in the trenches of France during World War I. By
then, at least seven collectors were gathering the stories directly
from lumberjacks who had told them out loud for the preceding forty
years.
Between 1904 and 1920, a handful of the oral Bunyan tales leaked
into a few magazines and newspapers, but they didn’t resonate with
the public and slipped quietly into oblivion. For example, when
Bunyan was first used in an advertising campaign targeted at lumber
wholesalers in 1914, it flopped because most of them simply didn’t
recognize his name.
During the 1920s, however, two professional writers who’d worked
in the woods as young men resurrected the Bunyan tales they’d
heard and spun them into conventional short fiction. The country
had just been catapulted onto the international stage by World War
I, and Americans were eager to embrace an indigenous folk hero
who could stand beside Hercules and Thor. Bunyan quickly became
an icon of American power and ingenuity, and readers rushed to
consume books, pamphlets, articles, and advertisements about the
plucky lumberjack hero. Because “folklore” could presumably be
created by anyone, entirely new stories were soon invented by
writers who’d never set foot near a logging camp, in which a gigantic
magical Bunyan performed fantastic feats such as creating the Grand
Canyon or the Rocky Mountains.
After the American economy collapsed in 1929, corporate
executives touted Bunyan as the ideal self-reliant worker who
needed no unions or government handouts. At the same time, leftist
organizers held him up as a symbol of the noble proletariat who
provided the muscle and know-how to make America strong again.
As the Bunyan mania continued to grow through the 1930s, elderly
loggers were pulled out of retirement to perform songs, stage
festivals, and host pageants. Depressed northwoods communities
tried to lure tourists and sportsmen, and Bunyan’s name appeared
on billboards and landmarks all across the cutover region. When
World War II erupted, American military propagandists quickly
enlisted Bunyan to fight the Germans and Japanese. A Paul Bunyan
craze had swept the nation.
But just after the war Bunyan came under attack. Academic
folklorists, intent on proving that their new scholarly discipline was
as rigorous as better-established ones, denounced the
popularizations as “fakelore.” When they discovered that the tales
had first been widely circulated by ad executive William Laughead
and lumber industry public relations officer James Stevens, some of
them even concluded there had never been any authentic oral
tradition at all. They threw the proverbial baby out with the
bathwater.
Richard Dorson, dean of American folklorists, led this 1940s and
1950s campaign against the Bunyan mania. “He is the pseudo folk
hero of twentieth century mass culture, a conveniently vague symbol
pressed into service to exemplify the American spirit. He means
different things to different vested interests: the soul of the
workingman to the Daily Worker…; the efficiency of American
capitalism to…the lumber companies; a gargantuan comic dummy
for resort promoters; the invincible brute strength of America to
some artists; a braggart and a blowhard, a fantasy, a performer of
enormous tasks, a deified woodsman, to other segments of the
American people. This is not popularization,” he concluded, “but
perversion.”1
Of course, in a contest between historical accuracy and
commercial interests the professors didn’t stand a chance, and the
protests of Dorson and his followers fell on deaf ears outside the
academy. The forces of “perversion” finally triumphed in 1957, when
Walt Disney Studios released a Bunyan cartoon complete with catchy
songs, absurd caricatures, and childish plot. This Disney version was
immensely popular and permanently infantilized the Bunyan stories
in the public mind. In just fifty years, the hero of rugged working-
class loggers had turned into pablum for toddlers in front of
televisions.
Why should we care about the strange career of Paul Bunyan?
First, because for most of the twentieth century he personified
certain American ideals, especially the values and desires of common
people who left few written records. Second, because his fate
illustrates how grassroots culture was appropriated and co-opted by
commercial interests. A similar process transformed Native American
warriors into cigar store Indians, and black rhythm and blues music
into Elvis Presley hits.
Bunyan began life as the private possession of unsophisticated
working people. From the 1880s until World War I, he expressed the
fears and aspirations of uneducated loggers as they risked their lives
at a brutal occupation in the frozen wilderness. But after 1925,
skillfully embellished tales about him by professional writers
captivated the nation. This new Bunyan embodied not the values of
working-class woodsmen but those of middle-class editors,
publishers, advertisers, and readers. Millions of Americans eagerly
embraced him as their nation emerged onto the world stage,
grappled with economic collapse, and faced up to a second world
war.
By the 1950s, the generation that could personally recall frontier
farms and virgin forests had dwindled away. In the age of the atomic
bomb and Telstar satellite, few people could understand lumberjacks’
jokes (or wanted to). Bunyan moved again, this time from the best-
seller shelf of bookstores and libraries into the children’s section.
During the second half of the century, millions of kids fell in love
with a sentimental Bunyan who entertained them in grammar school
readers, television shows, and comic books.
As with the earlier versions, this final incarnation of the lumberjack
hero expressed the beliefs, desires, and standards of value of his
creators. He taught that the natural environment was merely raw
ingredients to be chopped up, blended by machinery, and spit out as
salable merchandise. He was a masculine role model for little boys
until they grew big enough for John Wayne, the Marlboro man, or
Bruce Willis. Besides the picture books, records, and cartoons
featuring Bunyan’s all-conquering strength, his name and image
were used to advertise jackknives, fishing lures, baseball caps,
hatchets, and other essential items of postwar boyhood gear.
Even today, Bunyan helps sell real estate, motel rooms, campsites,
hamburgers, and pancake breakfasts to nostalgic tourists. There is a
Paul Bunyan state park, bluegrass festival, snowmobile trail, bicycle
club, sled dog race, driving tour, rifle club, scenic byway, marathon,
and, of course, shopping mall (in Bemidji, Minnesota).
Other writers have thoroughly investigated how and why Paul
Bunyan grew into a national icon.2 But where did it all begin? How
did the private jokes of lumberjacks become America’s most popular
folk hero? It was Richard Dorson who first suggested, back in 1951,
that, “The most interesting folklore problem connected with Paul
Bunyan lies in uncovering the early oral tradition.”3
The remnants of that tradition can be found in the unpublished
letters, interview notes, obscure pamphlets, and long-forgotten
articles on which this book is based; the earliest and most detailed
of these come from Wisconsin. Despite decades of academic interest
in Bunyan tales from other states, the Wisconsin sources that
document the oral tradition have been almost entirely overlooked by
researchers. When they are examined alongside the better-known
sources, it becomes clear that Wisconsin was at the center of the
Bunyan legend.
Wisconsin anthropologist Charles E. Brown (1872–1946) first
heard Bunyan tales in the early 1890s and began to systematically
collect them from loggers in 1906. His unpublished letters, interview
notes, and privately printed booklets contain dozens of the stories he
gathered. Brown’s role in helping to create Bunyan’s reputation has
been almost entirely ignored by academic folklorists (see chapter 9).
In February 1910, a Milwaukee nature magazine called Outer’s
Book printed the first collection of Bunyan stories to reach a national
audience. They were gathered directly from lumberjacks by
journalist James Rockwell (1883–1953). Wisconsin timber cruiser
Eugene Shepard may have been one of Rockwell’s sources, as his
exploits are described in the article. Although the Milwaukee Outer’s
Book put Bunyan stories in front of thousands of hunters and anglers
around the country and was quickly reprinted in newspapers, no
historian or folklorist has previously noted it (see chapter 7).
From 1914 to 1916, University of Wisconsin undergraduate
Bernice Stewart (1894–1975) and her English professor Homer Watt
(1884–1948) traveled through Wisconsin lumber camps and
northern towns collecting the tales. They were the first scholars who
tried to systematically gather Bunyan stories, and academic
folklorists still believe their 1916 collection contains the most
authentic versions. Although their publication is often cited,
Stewart’s and Watt’s research methods have never before been
described in detail (see chapter 8).
Instead, historians concentrated on two more famous groups of
tales. The first is the “Round River” sequence published in the small
town of Oscoda, Michigan, in 1906 and reprinted in 1910 and 1914;
these can be traced back to oral roots on Michigan’s Au Sable River
in 1887. The other group was created in Minnesota in 1914 by
William Laughead for the Red River Lumber Company, from tales he
first heard in Minnesota in 1901; when it was reprinted in 1922,
Laughead’s collection launched the national mania for Bunyan.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the history of Laughead’s Minnesota
versions attracted much scholarly attention, and twenty-five years
later so did the Michigan Round River recension, while the Wisconsin
sources remained hidden.4
The neglected Wisconsin stories about Paul Bunyan were created
earlier than the better-known ones from Michigan and Minnesota.
They also reached a national audience sooner, differed substantially
in their content, and provide richer evidence about the authentic oral
tradition.
 The chapters that follow first describe the logging camps where
the Bunyan tales were born, explain how the stories were told aloud,
chronicle their emergence into print, discuss how printing forever
changed them, and locate them within the larger movement that
made Paul Bunyan a household name. Chapter 11 examines the
surviving evidence for claims about Bunyan’s origin and uncovers the
roots of the Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota recensions of the
tales.
More than one hundred of the earliest Bunyan stories are given in
the appendix. Some are published here for the first time from
manuscripts, letters, or collectors’ field notes, while others are
reprinted from privately printed, ephemeral booklets and obscure
magazine articles. They describe a protagonist quite different from
the familiar hero of later popular versions and children’s books. They
illuminate the values of the working-class men who, between 1880
and 1915, transformed ancient Great Lakes forests into lumber for
the houses, churches, and storefronts that still surround us today.
Those lumberjacks are all silent now, vanished like the virgin forests
they entered more than a century ago, but their voices, their jokes,
their fears, and their hopes can still be heard in the fantastic tales
they made up around bunkhouse camp stoves on long winter
evenings.
 CHAPTER TWO
Bunyan’s Origins in Fact and
Fiction

“The crew on the pyramid forty was so large that Paul kept one
group going to work, one coming from work, and one working all
the time.”*

STORIES ABOUT PAUL BUNYAN were born in Great Lakes logging camps
in the mid-1880s, as veteran woodsmen tried to impress gullible new
recruits with remarkable feats they had supposedly witnessed long
before. The stories about Bunyan grew from three interwoven roots:
• Traditional folktales. Many of the Bunyan stories’ motifs—the central
image or plot twist that makes a tale entertaining—had been used in much
earlier folktales that didn’t even mention logging or Bunyan. Many came from
colonial New England, but some date back to Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. A good example is the tale of the stretching harness
(appendix, no. 44).
• Early logging stories. Other Bunyan tales incorporated early-nineteenth-
century anecdotes from the logging industry in Maine or eastern Canada that
memorialized remarkable events. These included stories and songs that
lumberjacks shared among themselves about death-defying logjams or
legendary forest creatures; these were circulating before Paul Bunyan, as a
character, had ever been imagined. Good examples are the descriptions of
the hodag and the hangdown, predators that roamed around Bunyan’s camp
(appendix, nos. 85 and 89).
• Original Bunyan tales. The folk hero Paul Bunyan was created in the mid-
1880s and inserted as the protagonist of traditional folktales and logging
stories. Wisconsin timber cruiser Bill Mulhollen told the earliest reliably
documented Bunyan stories north of Tomahawk, Wisconsin, in the winter of
1885–1886 (appendix, no. 5). As Bunyan became known among lumberjacks,
 new stories were invented specifically about his exploits. These later tales
were set in logging camps, and their humor depended on familiarity with the
industry’s techniques and jargon. A good example is Otis Terpening’s short
sequence concerning Paul’s problems making an ice road (appendix, no. 22).

The thousands of later books, articles, stories, advertisements,

comic books, television shows, picture books, and tourist attractions
about Paul Bunyan all grew from these roots.
Because the earliest Bunyan tales originally circulated in
wilderness logging camps, readers can’t fully understand them
without knowing at least a little about the ways that white pine
forests were harvested by hand and the unique jargon used by
woodsmen in the nineteenth century. This chapter briefly describes
how Great Lakes logging was performed, prints a lumberjack’s own
account of a typical day in the Wisconsin pineries about 1890, and
examines early speculations about Bunyan’s origin.
The North American logging industry began in the forests of
Maine, Quebec, and New Brunswick in the early nineteenth century.
Before the Civil War it spread south and west into upstate New York,
western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. As the
great pines in those states were exhausted around the turn of the
twentieth century, lumbering spread even further afield into
southern states, California, and the Pacific Northwest.
In Wisconsin, lumbering started about 1830 and grew rapidly
during the 1850s, after treaties were signed with the Ojibwe and
Menominee Indians. At the time, the northern third of the state was
almost entirely covered in ancient forests. A modern historian has
calculated that the northern Wisconsin forests ceded in the 1837 and
1842 treaties with the Ojibwe amounted to 170 billion board feet of
timber (a board foot measures twelve inches by twelve inches by
one inch thick).1
But mere statistics cannot convey the power of the primeval
forest. The first lumbermen around Rice Lake, Wisconsin, “were
tremendously impressed by the giant virgin white pines that grew
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